Peter Watts - Blindsight

A sudden flicker from behind. I spun in the cramped passageway and bit down on a cry: something squirmed out of sight around the corner, something with arms , barely glimpsed, gone in an instant.

Never there. Couldn’t be there. Impossible.

“Did you hear that?” Szpindel asked, but I’d fled to stern before Michelle could answer him.

We’d fallen so far that the naked eye didn’t see a disk, barely even saw curvature any more. We were falling towards a wall , a vast roiling expanse of dark thunderclouds that extended in all directions to some new, infinitely-distant horizon. Ben filled half the universe.

And still we fell.

Far below, Jack clung to Rorschach ’s ridged surface with bristly gecko-feet fenders and set up camp. It sent x-rays and ultrasound into the ground, tapped enquiring fingers and listened to the echos, planted tiny explosive charges and measured the resonance of their detonations. It shed seeds like pollen: tiny probes and sensors by the thousands, self-powered, near-sighted, stupid and expendable. The vast majority were sacrificial offerings to random chance; only one in a hundred lasted long enough to return usable telemetry.

While our advance scout took measure of its local neighborhood, Theseus drew larger-scale birdseye maps from the closing sky. It spat out thousands of its own disposable probes, spread them across the heavens and collected stereoscopic data from a thousand simultaneous perspectives.

Patchwork insights assembled in the drum. Rorschach ’s skin was sixty percent superconducting carbon nanotube. Rorschach ’s guts were largely hollow; at least some of those hollows appeared to contain an atmosphere. No earthly form of life would have lasted a second in there, though; intricate topographies of radiation and electromagnetic force seethed around the structure, seethed within it. In some places the radiation was intense enough to turn unshielded flesh to ash in an instant; calmer backwaters would merely kill in the same span of time. Charged particles raced around invisible racetracks at relativistic speeds, erupting from jagged openings, hugging curves of magnetic force strong enough for neutron stars, arcing through open space and plunging back into black mass. Occasional protuberances swelled and burst and released clouds of microparticulates, seeding the radiation belts like spores. Rorschach resembled nothing so much as a nest of half-naked cyclotrons, tangled one with another.

Neither Jack below nor Theseus above could find any points of entry, beyond those impassable gaps that spat out streams of charged particles or swallowed them back down. No airlocks or hatches or viewports resolved with increasing proximity. The fact that we’d been threatened via laser beam implied some kind of optical antennae or tightcast array; we weren’t even able to find that much.

A central hallmark of von Neumann machines was self-replication. Whether Rorschach would meet that criterion — whether it would germinate, or divide, or give birth when it passed some critical threshold — whether it had done so already — remained an open question.

One of a thousand. At the end of it all — after all the measurements, the theorizing and deduction and outright guesswork — we settled into orbit with a million trivial details and no answers. In terms of the big questions, there was only one thing we knew for sure.

So far, Rorschach was holding its fire.

“It sounded to me like it knew what it was saying,” I remarked.

“I guess that’s the whole point,” Bates said. She had no one to confide in, partook of no intimate dialogs that could be overheard. With her, I used the direct approach.

Theseus was birthing a litter, two by two. They were nasty-looking things, armored, squashed egg-shapes, twice the size of a human torso and studded with gardening implements: antennae, optical ports, retractable threadsaws. Weapons muzzles.

Bates was summoning her troops. We floated before the primary fab port at the base of Theseus ’ spine. The plant could just as easily have disgorged the grunts directly into the hold beneath the carapace — that was where they’d be stored anyway, until called upon — but Bates was giving each a visual inspection before sending it through one of the airlocks a few meters up the passageway. Ritual, perhaps. Military tradition. Certainly there was nothing she could see with her eyes that wouldn’t be glaringly obvious to the most basic diagnostic.

“Would it be a problem?” I asked. “Running them without your interface?”

“Run themselves just fine. Response time actually improves without spam in the network. I’m more of a safety precaution.”

Theseus growled, giving us more attitude. The plating trembled to stern; another piece of local debris, no longer in our path. We were angling towards an equatorial orbit just a few miniscule kilometers above the artefact; insanely, the approach curved right through the accretion belt.

It didn’t bother the others. “Like surviving traffic in a high speed lane,” Sascha had said, disdainful of my misgivings. “Try creeping across and you’re road kill. Gotta speed up, go with the flow.” But the flow was turbulent; we hadn’t gone five minutes without a course correction since Rorschach had stopped talking to us.

“So, do you buy it?” I asked. “Pattern-matching, empty threats? Nothing to worry about?”

“Nobody’s fired on us yet,” she said. Meaning: Not for a second .

“What’s your take on Susan’s argument? Different niches, no reason for conflict?”

“Makes sense, I guess.” Utter bullshit .

“Can you think of any reason why something with such different needs would attack us?”

“That depends,” she said, “on whether the fact that we are different is reason enough.”

I saw playground battlefields reflected in her topology. I remembered my own, and wondered if there were any other kind.

Then again, that only proved the point. Humans didn’t really fight over skin tone or ideology; those were just handy cues for kin-selection purposes. Ultimately it always came down to bloodlines and limited resources.

“I think Isaac would say this is different,” I said.

“I guess.” Bates sent one grunt humming off to the hold; two more emerged in formation, spinelight glinting off their armor.

“How many of these are you making, anyway?”

“We’re breaking and entering, Siri. Not wise to leave our own house unguarded.”

I inspected her surfaces as she inspected theirs. Doubt and resentment simmered just beneath.

“You’re in a tough spot,” I remarked.

“We all are.”

“But you’re responsible for defending us, against something we don’t know anything about. We’re only guessing that—”

“Sarasti doesn’t guess ,” Bates said. “The man’s in charge for a reason. Doesn’t make much sense to question his orders, given we’re all about a hundred IQ points short of understanding the answer anyway.”

“And yet he’s also got that whole predatory side nobody talks about,” I remarked. “It must be difficult for him, all that intellect coexisting with so much instinctive aggression. Making sure the right part wins.”

She wondered in that instant whether Sarasti might be listening in. She decided in the next that it didn’t matter: why should he care what the cattle thought, as long as they did what they were told?

All she said was, “I thought you jargonauts weren’t supposed to have opinions.”

“That wasn’t mine.”